WORD SEGMENTATION - THE ROLE OF DISTRIBUTIONAL CUES

One of the infant's first tasks in language acquisition is to discover the words embedded in a mostly continuous speech stream. This learnin g problem might be solved by using distributional cues to word boundar ies-for example, by computing the transitional probabilities between s ounds in the language input and using the relative strengths of these probabilities to hypothesize word boundaries. The learner might be fur ther aided by language-specific prosodic cues correlated with word bou ndaries. As a first step in testing these hypotheses, we briefly expos ed adults to an artificial language in which the only cues available f or word segmentation were the transitional probabilities between sylla bles. Subjects were able to learn the words of this language. Furtherm ore, the addition of certain prosodic cues served to enhance performan ce. These results suggest that distributional cues may play an importa nt role in the initial word segmentation of language learners. (C) 199 6 Academic Press, Inc.